Nothing But a Star

by Jeremy Reed

  lashed with purple mascara

  drinking gin as ruin

  with the moon in her eye

  if I drink another tumbler

  of the blues then I’ll die

  Poison’s my kind of ruin

  it’s sweet as black honey

  money’s like a drug

  a high end addiction

  I wanna be like Billie

  with a flower in her hair

  a voice sweet as black honey

  there’s money in despair

  but don’t confuse the issue

  there’s no right or wrong

  if I drink another tumbler

  I’ll drown in the song

  Poison’s my kind of ruin

  it’s sweet as black honey

  money’s like a drug

  a high end addiction

  I wanna squeeze the rhythm

  like juice from my voice

  of course I’ve got no choice

  at the mike I slalom

  if I’m another Billie

  I’ll take you there too

  if black honey’s money

  then it’s also the blues

  Poison’s my kind of ruin

  it’s sweet as black honey

  money’s like a drug

  a high end addiction

  I wanna be a pirate

  in a black patch and a hat

  a bandit, a hoodlum

  don’t need a teacher for that

  I’m a student of Billie’s

  the thrill’s in the kill

  when I fly out to Moscow

  I’ve got six hours to chill

  Poison’s my kind of ruin

  it’s sweet as black honey

  money’s like a drug

  a high end addiction

  I wanna chase tomorrow

  like a rainbow in the sky

  I tell you that dreaming

  teaches you how to fly

  if I’m another Billie

  I’ll take you there too

  if black honey’s money

  then it’s also the blues

  Excess and Ruin—(Dorian)

  Every pretty boy hustler

  goes down to the Dilly

  blond trash likes tainted cash

  or a cute sugar daddy

  If I met Jack the Ripper

  I’d make him confess

  you get ruined by numbers

  as a dangerous excess

  Excess and ruin

  the two go together

  like whiskey and ginger

  makes stormy red weather

  Every boy on the game’s

  the same as a woman

  he wants diamonds and clothes

  and a big spender man

  When I met Henry Wotton

  at the bottom of the pile

  he’d got diamond fillings

  and a knife in his smile

  Excess and ruin

  the two go together

  like whiskey and ginger

  makes stormy red weather

  Henry gave me the gold key

  to the city’s outlaws

  I pick-pocketed pockets

  like a cat with quick paws

  I got entrees to soirees

  bad blood attracts class

  when I picked up a tumbler

  I left lipstick on the glass

  Excess and ruin

  the two go together

  like whiskey and ginger

  makes stormy red weather

  When I killed for the thrill

  I felt nothing at all

  like tagging graffiti

  in red squirts on a wall

  If I met Jack the Ripper

  I’d make him confess

  you get ruined by numbers

  as a dangerous excess

  Excess and ruin

  the two go together

  like whiskey and ginger

  makes red stormy weather

  I’ve lost the incentive

  to chase new sensation

  there’s nothing survives

  but my own degradation

  If I met Jack the Ripper

  I’d make him confess

  that winning and losing’s

  a dangerous excess

  Excess and ruin

  the two go together

  like whiskey and ginger

  make red stormy weather

  Sibyl Vane’s Blues

  I’m a glammed-up glamour-puss

  in paste and Screen Face makeup

  I’m Dorian’s fixation

  when I play the Haymarket

  I’m a teen chasing fame

  a cockney wannabe bit

  I’m a name in the spotlight

  strutting sex before the pit

  I sold myself on the docks

  converted flesh into money

  and learnt to tell punters

  no money no honey

  from Limehouse to Mayfair

  I hammed up my part

  throwing angles and shapes

  from a real bleeding heart

  He was queer and I knew it

  Mister Dorian Gray

  he sent me flowers and dresses

  (men do when they’re gay)

  He was queer and I knew it

  but I needed his lies

  and the booze and corruption

  that drew rings round his eyes

  I condensed my emotions

  to projecting on stage

  did jealousy, revenge,

  vehemence and rage

  and he took it all in

  Mister Dorian Gray

  told me I was the cure

  for men who are gay

  And that cheap Mister Isaacs

  who ripped off my earnings

  an entrepreneurial Jew

  with a fist full of gold rings

  he was trashy as sleaze

  and I thought that he’d pay

  but his twisted deceit

  was like Dorian Gray’s

  He was queer and I knew it

  Mister Dorian Gray

  he sent me flowers and dresses

  (men do when they’re gay)

  He was queer and I knew it

  and I just didn’t care

  I forgave him his lies

  for the blond streaks in his hair

  My brother Jim saw it all

  Gray as my ruin

  and I sang in our cracked bath

  an old music hall tune

  of how everything’s nothing

  and both are the same

  and you don’t trust nobody

  when you’ve been on the game

  He was queer and I knew it

  Mister Dorian Gray

  he sent me flowers and dresses

  (men do when they’re gay)

  he was queer and I knew it

  but I needed his lies

  and the booze and corruption

  that drew rings round his eyes

  A THOUSAND STARS IN MY EYES

  HQ

  The sunset’s a pill-shaped scarlet dollop

  a planet flipped out of a bubble pack

  150 million kilometres away

  in the west-facing Magdala window

  like a vermilion polymer

  coating. What happened today

  it could have been one hundred years ago,

  there’s nothing left to grab or show

  like locking keys inside a car

  with the ignition on. We talk time back

  into the present by channel surfing

  our neural highways. There’s a new Neil Young

  signposting debate (Le Noise)—testy

  as a submerged biomarker

  given guitar angles without a band

  and timeless as a gene upload. The day’s

  dumped into a black unknown zone,

  rain coming on, accelerated squirts

  of randomised diamond October showers.

/>   A banana’s 105 calories

  (a cup of black tea). I know these things

  as crucial to my body weight in time.

  We talk and drink, recover what we can

  that makes us individual—you and me—

  and what we’ve done like two missing persons

  gatewayed into our ripped up century.

  Hanging On

  Wind spills the magnolia like a drinks tray

  a sashaying hot cerise swirl

  like a pink shampoo

  in my grainy window out.

  These days I hang in disconnect,

  a shoe

  lacking another shoe

  to pair. The more I know the less,

  96 per cent of the universe

  comes up as blackout dark matter,

  dark energy, like unused brain

  turned dark side of the Moon.

  It’s detail I collect obsessively

  like counting stitches on a shirt

  or looking at the lipstick bleed

  left on a coffee cup.

  Sometimes I follow a shoe for its heel

  or peeks of a red satin-lined footbed

  a Christian Lacroix.

  Falling apart is hanging on

  to little things that personally mean,

  a song still going on in my head,

  the black forked snake’s tongue

  on a loose button thread

  a smile framed at me in the street

  like cutting chocolate cake.

  I never write the dead out of my book

  or take their numbers off my phone.

  Sometimes I punch in numbers for a dead

  friend gone, just for the ring-tone’s

  familiar frequency.

  My magnolia does a splashy striptease

  littering its purple silks.

  I try to get more present in my past,

  move on into the day under churned skies

  living each fine-tuned moment like my last.

  Ham Yard

  We’re outlaws manipulating a space

  into a Wednesday photo-shoot,

  your Canon morphing time like chewing gum

  tweaked into a retextured shape

  with each rotation of the tongue,

  only it’s Ilford HP5,

  that’s your black and white space-time signature,

  film noir et blanc 36 EX

  to gun me in our accelerated fifteen minutes

  optimal burn-up burn-out intensity.

  We’re saturated in the place,

  its abraded dirt worked into our skins

  like Moon grit, and that scorched black wall

  is like a slab of peeling depression

  resistant to a chemical.

  I’m thrown about looking to find angles

  in what you do, our spontaneity’s

  so simultaneous, we scare

  expression into attitude.

  I’m blacked out by dark blue reflective shades

  piloting thrown-up arm gestures

  like contrails posted on the Soho sky.

  36 run-ins and we’re done,

  my Converse treads like skid-marks on the yard,

  the raw punkish improvised shoot done quick

  as though we’re engaged in a hit and run.

  White Poppy Blues—song for Amy Winehouse

  When I sit in this yard

  and it’s hard being me

  a white poppy stumps up

  by a blue morning glory

  I’m in Camden or Mill Hill

  with a pill and a guitar

  a bluesy soul diva

  a rock and roll star

  Sometimes when I’m alone

  stone cold and half dead

  it’s a single white poppy

  opens out in my head

  In the back of the bar

  I’m too far gone to see

  Keith Richards’ ghost

  like a smoky poppy

  If I’m on all the time

  then it’s a crime to stop

  you can take me to the bottom

  but I’m still at the top

  Sometimes when I’m alone

  stone cold and half dead

  it’s a single white poppy

  does blues in my head

  When I sit in this yard

  and it’s hard being me

  I mix stardust and moondust

  in my chemistry

  I’m in Camden or Mill Hill

  with a pill and some hope

  a date I’ve forgotten

  and some grade one dope

  Sometimes when I’m alone

  stone cold and half dead

  it’s an opium poppy

  explodes in my head

  When I sit in a yard

  or go underground

  the losers I’ve lost

  are the winners I find

  I’m really on my own

  on a dusty white moon

  I’m a rock and roll star

  with whiskey in my tune

  If I’m down on myself

  then I’m up on you

  I see Keith Richards’ ghost

  and it’s turning blue

  If I sing the blues black

  I’ll be singing till I drop

  you can take me to the bottom

  but I’m still at the top

  Roses and Guns

  Mine’s cassis, a single rose given me

  from Wild Bunch, I search out vermilion

  or sticky tart reds, scarlet,

  Mac Russian red to hot up rose

  associations, and solo in cellophane

  that fits the stem like a condom

  is gifted me for poetry

  locked into my hand like a gun,

  a Gloch or Luger brainstem snout

  the firepower metaphor,

  I write to rip holes in society,

  each image an intended bullet-nosed

  subversive shattering.

  The world tilts into unnamed World War Three,

  economies in the ejector seat,

  the desert twisted into a cyclone

  of toxic dust, the czar’s mobile-fortress

  tanking through the city, armed outriders

  gunning a sonic outlawed corridor,

  while I tweak poetry like spot gold shares

  into another catastrophic blue chip crash.

  Pills

  A sticky toffee afternoon:

  I write a pop song: Loretta’s

  left a red shoe on the Moon.

  A green coating to a mood pill

  adds chill, a blue

  does sublingual serenity.

  Yellow’s a dose of hot sunshine

  delivered euphorically.

  The brand stamps are like graffiti

  tagged into polymer coating—

  I call it scratchy poetry,

  Merck, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline

  giving brain chemistry shine,

  Viagra bluer than cool

  blue diamonds, or the sapphire pit

  of a Hollywood swimming pool.

  Most serotonin boosters

  are shaped like space toys,

  they’ll get software to off-world rocks

  no bigger than a laptop

  with a drug giant logo.

  White antacid pills are moondust,

  you swallow three days travel

  in their metabolic churn

  like footprints crunched on the Moon.

  Nexium’s a purple pill

  the only purple glaze in the drug’s lab.

  I got it for acid reflux

  in stony cold rehab

  and grew colour addicted to its cool.

  Prozac’s a two-tone scooter, green and white

  for throwing upbeat hooky shapes.

  It’s blues I do, not power-pointed red,

  working the colour up to visualise

  a blue bluer than the blues in my head.
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  Retro Shirts

  It’s fine-point detail I retrieve

  label and cut, collar point and stitching,

  this dark blue affair snowed with polka dots

  three buttons on a barrel cuff,

  a John Stephen 1968,

  the pixellated spots like a frozen flurry

  vertical on a blue-black winter night.

  I riffle two-tones in this Camden yard,

  a pink and white confection like ice cream

  the shirt body bright strawberry,

  the collar built high, the spearpoints

  cut like a pair of runway legs:

  Naomi Campbell’s catwalk pins?

  I look for buttons grouped in two and threes,

  a fly-front on a gingham button-down,

  a ruffle like a ski-slope, white on white,

  or pink roses scattered like confetti

  over an altered-state floral design.

  I search all afternoon, obsessively,

  preoccupied by paisley helices

  bold as tattoos, a blue swirl on a brown,

  a red twinning with yellow, op and pop

  motifs, a peacock-green teardrop on grey—

  a John Stephen creation that I prize

  for its detailed aesthetic literacy,

  the stitching tight as a neural network.

  I take a break to drink jasmine-green tea,

  then return, quizzical, acquisitive,

  skinning a rail of shimmying fabrics

  bright as the colours saved by memory.

  I go home with my accumulative lot

  bunched into carriers, a retro coup

  of shirty flamboyance—a sixties scene

  flash-forwarded as pattern on my back,

  the best a John Stephen fog grey shiver

  dissolved into a vaporous blue-black.

  Shares

  Another risk modeller’s kamikaze

  zeroes into liquidity,

  the virtual blinded by light-speed delays

  like contact from another star

  or hemlines rising and falling,

  mini gone optimal micro

  like Britney Spears, or dragged back to the knee.

  Most futures contracts sit with psychopaths—

  bunkered hedge funders radiating Earth